The Bashkirs ( , ) or Bashkorts (, ; , ) are a Turkic ethnic group indigenous to Russia. They are concentrated in Bashkortostan, a republic of the Russian Federation and in the broader historical region of Badzhgard, which spans both sides of the Ural Mountains, where Eastern Europe meets North Asia. Smaller communities of Bashkirs also live in the Republic of Tatarstan, Perm Krai, the oblasts of Chelyabinsk, Orenburg, Tyumen, Sverdlovsk, Kurgan, and other regions in Russia; sizeable minorities exist in Kazakhstan.
Most Bashkirs speak the Bashkir language, which is similar to the Tatar, Kazakh and Kyrgyz languages. The Bashkir language belongs to the Kipchak branch of Turkic languages; they share historical and cultural affinities with the broader Turkic peoples. Bashkirs are mainly Sunni Muslims of the Hanafi school madhhab, or school of jurisprudence, and follow the Jadid doctrine. Previously nomadic and fiercely independent, the Bashkirs gradually came under Russian rule beginning in the 16th century; they have since played a major role through the history of Russia, culminating in their autonomous status within the Russian Empire, Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia.
Ethnonym
The etymology and indeed meaning of the endonym Bashqurt has been for a long time under discussion.
The name Bashqurt has been known since the 10th century, most researchers etymologize the name as "main/leader/head" (bash) + "wolf" (qurt being an archaic name for the animal), thus "wolf-leader" (from the totemic hero ancestor).
This prevailing folk etymology relates to a legend regarding the migration of the first seven Bashkir tribes from the Syr Darya valley to the Volga-Ural region. The legend relates that the Bashkirs were given a green and fertile land by the fertility goddess of Tengrism Umay (known locally also as Umay-əsə), protected by the legendary Ural mountains (in alignment with the famous Bashkir epic poem "Ural-Batyr"). A wolf was sent to guide these tribes to their promised land, hence bash-qurt, "leading wolf". The ethnographers V. N. Tatishchev, P. I. Richkov, and Johann Gottlieb Georgi provided similar etymologies in the 18th century.
Although this is the prevailing theory for an etymology of the term bashqurt, other theories have been formulated: In 1847, the historian V. S. Yumatov speculated the original meaning to have been "beekeeper or beemaster". Douglas Morton Dunlop proposed bashqurt being derived from the forms beshgur, bashgur, which means "five oghurs". Since modern sh corresponds to l in Bulgar language. Therefore, Dunlop proposes the ethnonyms Bashqurt and Bulgar are equivalent. Zeki Velidi Togan also suggested this. Historian and ethnologist A. E. Alektorov has suggested that Bashqurt meant "distinct nation". Anthropologist R. M. Yusupov considered Bashqurt may originally have been an Iranian compound word meaning "wolf-children" or "descendants of heroes", on the basis of the words bacha "descendant, child" and gurd "hero" or gurg "wolf". Historian and archaeologist Mikhail Artamonov suggested that the word is a corruption of the name of the Bušxk (or Bwsxk), a tribe of Scythia that lived in the area now known as Bashkortostan.Peter B. Golden, Haggai Ben-Shammai & András Róna-Tas, The World of the Khazars: New Perspectives, Leiden/Boston, Brill, 2007, pp. 422. Ethnologist N. V. Bikbulatov suggested that the term originated from the name of a legendary Khazar warlord named Bashgird, who ruled an area along the Yayıq river. Ethnologist R. G. Kuzeev derived the ethnonym from the morphemes bash "leader, head" and qurt "tribe". Historian and linguist András Róna-Tas argued the ethnonym "Bashkir" to be a Bulgar Turkic reflex of the Hungarian endonym Magyar (or the Old Hungarian Majer).
History
Origins
The Bashkir group was formed by Turkic tribes of South Siberian and Central Asian origin, who, before migrating to the Southern Urals, wandered for a considerable time in the Aral-Syr Darya steppes (modern day central-southern Kazakhstan), coming into contact with the Pecheneg-Oghuz and Kimak-Kipchak tribes. Therefore, it is possible to note that the Bashkir people originates from the same tribes which compose the modern Kazakhs, Kyrgyz and Nogais, but there has been a considerable cultural and a small ethnic exchange with Oghuz tribes.
The migration to the valley of the Southern Urals took place between the end of the 9th century and the beginning of the 10th century, in parallel to the Kipchak migration to the north.
Middle Ages
The first report about Bashkirs may have been in the Chinese chronicle Book of Sui (636 AD). Around 40 Turkic Tiele tribes were named in the section "A Narration about the Tiele people"; Bashkirs might have been included within that narration, if the tribal name 比干 (Mandarin Bǐgān ← Middle Chinese ZS: *piɪX-kɑn) (in Book of Wei) were a scribal error for 比千 (Bĭqiān ← *piɪXt͡sʰen) (in History of the Northern Dynasties), the latter reading being favored by Chinese scholar Rui Chuanming.
In the 7th century, Bashkirs were also mentioned in the Armenian Ashkharatsuyts.
However, these mentions may refer to the precursors of the Kipchak Bashkir tribes who travelled in the Aral-Syr Darya region before the migration. The Book of Sui may have mentioned "Bashkirs" when the Turkic peoples were still travelling through southern Siberia.
In the 9th century, during the migration of the Bashkirs to the Volga-Ural region, the first Arabic and Persian-written reports about Bashkirs are attested. These include reports by Sallam al-Tardjuman who around 850 travelled to the Bashkir territories and outlined their borders.
In the 10th century, the Persian historian and polymath Abu Zayd al-Balkhi described Bashkirs as a people divided into two groups: one inhabiting the Southern Urals, the other living on the Wallachian Plain–Danubian Plain near the boundaries of Byzantium.These sources may have confused Bashkirs with Hungarians, since the area of Modern Bashkortostan is often referred as "Magna Hungaria", the zone where the Magyar tribes dwelled before their migration to Europe; it is believed that Bashkirs may have come into contact with these Magyar tribes, since some of the Northern Tribes of the modern Bashkirs do have genetic correspondence with Hungarians Ibn Rustah, a contemporary of Abu Zayd al-Balkhi, observed that Bashkirs were an independent people occupying territories on both sides of the Ural Mountains ridge between Volga, Kama, and Tobol Rivers and upstream of the Yaik river.
Ahmad ibn Fadlan, ambassador of the Baghdad Caliph Al-Muqtadir to the governor of Volga Bulgaria, wrote the first ethnographic description of the Bashkir in 922. The Bashkirs, according to Ibn Fadlan, were a warlike and powerful people, which he and his companions (a total of five thousand people, including military protection) "bewared... with the greatest threat". They were described as engaged in cattle breeding. According to ibn Fadlan, the Bashkirs worshipped twelve gods: winter, summer, rain, wind, trees, people, horses, water, night, day, death, heaven and earth, and the most prominent, the sky god. Apparently, Islam had already begun to spread among the Bashkirs, as one of the ambassadors was a Muslim Bashkir. According to the testimony of Ibn Fadlan, the Bashkirs were Turks, living on the southern slopes of the Urals, and occupying a vast territory up to the river Volga. They were bordered by Oghuz Turks on the south, Pechenegs to the south-east and Bulgars on the west.
The earliest source to give a geographical description of Bashkir territory, Mahmud al-Kashgari's Divanu Lugat'it Turk (1072–1074), includes a map with a charted region called Fiyafi Bashqyrt (the Bashkir steppes). Despite a lack of much geographic detail, the sketch map does indicate that the Bashkirs inhabited a territory bordering on the Caspian Sea and the Volga valley in the west, the Ural Mountains in the north-west, and the Irtysh valley in the east, thus giving a rough outline of the area.
Said Al-Andalusi and Muhammad al-Idrisi mention the Bashkir in the 12th century. The 13th-century authors Ibn Sa'id al-Maghribi, Yaqut al-Hamawi and Qazvini and the 14th-century authors Al-Dimashqi and Abu'l-Fida also wrote about Bashkirs.
The first European sources to mention the Bashkirs were the works of Friar Julian, Joannes de Plano Carpini and William of Rubruquis of the 13th century.
By 1226, Genghis Khan had incorporated the lands of Bashkortostan into his empire. During the 13th and 14th centuries, all of Bashkortostan was a component of the Golden Horde. The brother of Batu-Khan, Sheibani, received the Bashkir lands east of the Ural Mountains.
After the disintegration of the Mongol Empire, the Bashkirs were divided among the Nogai Horde, the Khanate of Kazan and the Khanate of Sibir, founded in the 15th century.
Early modern period
In the middle of the 16th century, Bashkirs were gradually conquered by the Tsardom of Russia. Primary documents pertaining to the Bashkirs during this period have been lost, although some are mentioned in the shezhere (family trees) of the Bashkir.
During the Russian Imperial period, Russians and Tatars began to migrate to Bashkortostan which led to eventual demographic changes in the region. The recruitment of Bashkirs into the Russian army and having to pay steep taxes pressured many Bashkirs to adopt a more settled lifestyle and to slowly abandon their ancient nomadic pastoralist past.
In the late 16th and early 19th centuries, Bashkirs occupied the territory from the river Sylva in the north, to the river heads of Tobol in the east, the mid-stream of the river Yaik (Ural) in the south; in the Middle and Southern Urals, the Cis-Urals including Volga territory and Trans-Uralsto, and the eastern bank of the river Volga on the south-west.
Bashkir rebellions of the 17th–18th centuries
The Bashkirs participated in the 1662–64, 1681–84 and 1704–11 uprisings. In 1676, the Bashkirs rebelled under a leader named Seyid Sadir or 'Seit Sadurov', and the Russian Army had great difficulties in ending the rebellion. The Bashkirs rose again in 1707, under Aldar and Kûsyom, due to perceived ill-treatment by Imperial Russian officials.
At the founding of Orenburg in 1735, the fourth insurrection occurred and lasted six years.Акманов И. Г. Башкирские восстания XVII–XVIII вв. Феномен в истории народов Евразии. – Уфа: Китап, 2016 Ivan Kirillov formed a plan to build the fort to be called Orenburg at Orsk at the confluence of the Or River and the Ural River, south-east of the Urals where the Bashkir, Kalmyk and Kazakh lands met. Work on Fort Orenburg commenced at Orsk in 1735. However, by 1743 the site of Orenburg was moved a further 250 km west to its current location. The next planned construction was to be a fort on the Aral Sea. The consequence of the Aral Sea fort would involve crossing Bashkir and the Kazakh Lesser Horde lands, some of whom had recently offered a nominal submission to the Russian Crown.
The southern side of Bashkiria was partitioned by the Orenburg Line of forts. The forts ran from Samara on the Volga east as far as the Samara River headwaters. It then crossed to the middle of the Ural River and following the river course east and then north on the eastern side of the Urals. It then went east along the Uy River to Ust-Uisk on the Tobol River where it connected to the ill-defined 'Siberian Line' along the forest-steppe boundary.
In 1774, the Bashkirs, under the leadership of Salavat Yulayev, supported Pugachev's Rebellion. In 1786, the Bashkirs achieved tax-free status; and in 1798 Russia formed an irregular Bashkir army from among them.
Napoleonic Wars